


hold back the river

by alifbay



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Love/Hate, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Post-War, like it's touched upon but not fully addressed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-07
Updated: 2018-06-07
Packaged: 2019-05-19 10:06:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,375
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14871719
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alifbay/pseuds/alifbay
Summary: This was how the story went: girl hated boy and boy hated girl. They kissed.It sucked.They kissed again.It still sucked.Or the story of how two idiots grow up and grow into their skin. And maybe, just maybe, they grow into each other too.





	hold back the river

**Author's Note:**

> short one-shot written for the rare pairs secret santa '16 on tumblr.
> 
> title from james bay's hold back the river

**It was a story about a girl in a bar.**

Seventeen year old Pansy Parkinson was not quite sure what fear tasted like. She was far more familiar with the taste of caviar and champagne, with gourmet dinners and luxury chocolate. At seventeen, she knew what  **excess**  felt like — it had been her entire life so far. An excess of luxury; of entitlement; of bullying. It was all she had ever known and all she had ever known to expect.

And then, along came her seventh year. 

An  _occupation_ , that’s what they were calling it — Pansy had heard the word whispered in a cautious hiss in passing and rolled her eyes. It was only an occupation for the fools who tried resistance; for the rest, it was still just a school. She might have been considered nothing more than a pair of pretty fluttering lashes and the sweep of thick blunt bangs against them, but Pansy was Slytherin for a reason: she understood  _survival_.

At least, that was what she had told herself at the beginning of the year. It would be just fine. The new teachers there were old friends of her father’s, a pair of siblings he had grown up with in the same decrepit old school halls they now prowled as teachers. Surely,  _she_  would have no problems. Those belonged to lesser people. The ones with blood less pure and image less perfect and tongues less sharp. Pansy Parkinson did not belong to the population who really believed it was an enemy occupation.

And then the lies had started spilling in.

One of her best friends was missing. Draco had chosen to stay home this year, but if the hissed whispers held any truth, there was another situation that warranted the word  _occupation_. But Malfoys did not belong in situations like that. Pansy had known them all her life; they were a step above. The royalty even among their own opulent circle. The thought was laughable. She still wrote him, of course, concern concealed in long rambling letters written in quick practiced cursive. And slowly, the same sentences she had always written had starting making her pause mid-alphabet. Who was she penning the reassurances for: the boy she thought was safe from it all or the girl who believed she was above the danger? They tasted false to her, regardless, these confident reassurances and carefully divulged gossip. It felt like lying to him. Like lying to herself.

The same letters flew home to her mother – minus the more scandalous anecdotes. She was doing perfectly well in her classes,  _yes, even Arithmancy, Mother_. The Carrows were perfectly lovely and having Professor Snape as Headmaster was a dream come true after six long years of tolerating an abominable optimistic dingbat with a vendetta against Slytherin house in the position. Nothing was going to go wrong that year; she would finish the year and graduate with relief. She wasn’t worried. 

Even when she sometimes felt herself flinching before she caught herself, balking on behalf of a student near her caught mid-rebellion and mouthing off about it. Even when she could hear them in the strangest moments, when there were times she would be innocently working in the library and it would hit her, the exact moment the resistance left one of them and their bluster extinguished with a whimper. Even when she started waking up on dreams featuring the invisible binds around her own wrists and glowing skulls over her house and her father’s blank unseeing gaze staring up from the dining table she had been eating at since she was six. They had created a dismal atmosphere over the castle since the beginning of the year, the whole lot of them. That was all. As much as the quietly reproachful opposite Daphne was to her sharp tongue, she was channeling the Greengrass girl’s spunk, silent but unshakable.

Pansy wasn’t worried. Nobody would dare spill a single drop of pure blood.

And then Astoria Greengrass had followed. Even as an apparently unremarkable sixth year, Astoria was tiny, but she was tiny the way a bullet was: small and sharp and capable of doing some damage. And she did, for longer than anybody could have guessed, until there was an  _altercation_  in the dungeons. Nobody really knew what happened, least of all Pansy. All that was known was that children who were meant to be chained in the dungeons for detention had been seen dispersing and then the screaming had begun. After, Daphne refused to say anything, but especially where her sister got the bloody slashes across one lovely perfect cheek, revealing nothing more than a disapproving sniff every time the younger Greengrass walked around the corner with her blue tie pristine and hair pulled back in open defiance to exhibit the livid marks.

All Pansy knew was this: if their perfect, lovely pureblood children were emerging battle-scarred now, every word she had been telling herself since the beginning of the year was just as false as every letter she wrote her mother.

In the end, that was why she did it, she thinks. The lies kept piling up until the tower toppled and suddenly, all she had wanted to do was  _run_. It would have been so simple: hand over the boy and it would have all stopped. They could have gone back to normal because it would have stopped. That was all she wanted. For it to  **stop**.

Now, she has no qualms like that anymore. The girl who never sees a reason to lie (not  _really_ ) because her tongue was too sharp to be caged slips deceit easier than  _please_  with her words:

No, she is not the same Pansy Parkinson. No, she is not suffering. No, she definitely does not work because she  _has_  to, only because she wants to for a change of scenery. No, she has no regrets about the buzzed hair. No, her father did not die in the Battle of Hogwarts for trying to run. No, her brother was not a Death Eater but yes, he did get caught in the crossfire anyway. Yes, she’d love to have tea and catch up with an old friend. Yes, she ratted Potter out and has no regrets about it. Yes, she goes to muggle pubs only for the convenience, that’s all. Yes, she’s happy. Yes, she is Pansy Parkinson.

They don’t pile up this time, if only because this version of Pansy Parkinson knows what to do with lies that could burn her house down. She lights them on fire on a pyre of cheap whiskey and still-burning cigarette butts. It works out.

This version of Pansy Parkinson is more likely to be found in corners than in the center of attention, more comfortable haunting shadows than monopolizing the light. This version wears her hard edges like a crown: sharp angles of her cheekbones and even the unfortunate snubbed nose revealed by the sharp crop that barely brushes her collarbone now, silver ring glinting at her nose and dragon hide leather jacket crisp and dark and perfect. She is a  girl most often found in a bar, in amused solitude than amid a murder of crows now, and she is fine with it. It is what it is, even if she never anticipated this future. The antithesis of her personality.

This is the life she gets to have and she can live with it.

   
**It was a story about a boy in a car.**

Nobody wrote books – or comics, at any rate – about the  _happily ever after_. It just  **was**. The hero got rid of the bad guys, got the girl, and got to live happily ever after. That was the way the story went. Everybody knew that, and had always known that. The only person who seemed to be left out of the plan was whoever was in charge of his story.

Because the story of Ron Weasley’s life went something like this: the hero got rid of the bad guys, and didn’t get The Girl, precisely. He fell for his  _sidekick_ ’s sister instead, and the sidekick got The Girl, except she was much more than just a girl, really. She was terrifying and wonderful and could do more damage with one flick of her wand than most wizards could with a whole host of spells and it was good. It was just a shame that nobody had spelled out the  _happily ever after_  for them, because in this story, the hero didn’t quite believe he deserved it. He struggled obviously for months and then internally for years while his sidekick floundered on the side for purpose and their girl went on to achieve amazing things.

And Hermione had. While he dealt with his family falling apart and Harry dealt with himself falling apart, Hermione had stepped up to be the dynamo she was always going to be. Terrifying, yes, but unstoppable nevertheless. Having returned to Hogwarts that September to finish seventh year officially, she now had her NEWTs completed and already held two Ministry promotions under her belt. Their girl was steadily climbing through the ranks, and Ron was proud of her the way only somebody who had known the eleven year old with the too-large front teeth, too-bushy hair and too much tenacity could be. She deserved every bit of success that she got.

Maybe that meant shelving the possibility of having more than friendship they had already spent so long denying, but he wouldn’t resent her for that. He may even have been a little relieved, not that he would admit it. Friendship between the two of them was  _easy_. They had been bickering since they had met on the Hogwarts Express at the age of eleven, and they weren’t about to stop anytime soon. A relationship was just unnecessarily complicating their bond when he wasn’t sure he wanted it. 

Especially when he no longer knew if he even wanted it. On the worst of his days, he considered what a bother it would have been, having a girlfriend and needing to be a functioning  _person_  for her when he barely felt like half of one most of the time. It had been easy to suggest saving the elves in the moment, something that hadn’t stuck him as heroic and impressive until she’d flung herself at him. It just made sense, in a way that them dating didn’t. Life didn’t seem to make much sense anymore.

For a while, after the war, he had worked at the joke shop. But while there was an open invitation to go back any time he wanted, taking Fred’s place had never been a thing he was even vaguely capable of. He _could_  always go back to Weasleys Wizard Wheezes, but he was gifted at neither invention nor sales and had just been there for George, really, and now that the twin left behind was as  _fine_  as he could be, he was no longer needed. Besides, he had completed the auror program and could technically join the force anytime he wanted. He should have, but he didn’t  _want_ it. They had fought enough darkness throughout their childhood; an annual parade since the year he had met Harry practically. If his best friend wanted to continue fighting crime, he was welcome to it. Despite finding his place at the side of an awkward bespectacled boy all those years ago, Ron wasn’t ready to go back to joining him in law enforcement. They had all their lives stretching in front of them for that. Ron wasn’t quite ready to go back to it just yet.

So at twenty-one, directionless and lost, Ron Weasley buys a car.

It is second-hand and disgraceful, a Ford Escort even shabbier than his father’s Anglia had been, with chipped paint a shade of orange Ginny has only been able to describe as  _revolting_.

Ron loves it like his own child, and certainly treats it like it, the dented metal meticulously washed once a week and lovingly polished once a month. The car is his first taste of  **free**. He hasn’t really felt this way in all his years: the thrum in his veins that comes with finding an open road and flooring it, watching the speedometer needle climb higher and higher, past seventy eighty ninety a hundred and then even higher, the adrenaline that comes with finding an obstruction and swerving past it or finding a line and crossing it in seconds. It feels like the best kind of release, like he can get lost and (even if he is found) never caught.

Nobody finds out either. They know he has a car, those close to him, but nobody knows the line of reckless he sometimes skirts and he has yet to be stopped by an acquaintance. 

If somebody recognizes him, they don’t comment. Not an awful lot of people do since the war. It was harder in the earlier years, when he had walked fresh out of a war bearing all the scars from the fight, minus one brother and plus a girlfriend he was never meant to have, but he’s old news now. The only person who even remembers the demons is him.

 

**It was a story that began with smoking guns.**

If somebody had told Ron Weasley he would be  **caught**  chasing thrills, he would have scoffed. Possible but improbable, as Hermione might have considered. He drove in deserted countryside, not places where people might run across him. He hid his cracked pieces under the armour of gold he’d been handed. He was a hero; not a tragedy.

Yet, being caught doing something as innocuous as having a drink with Pansy Parkinson feels illicit. More so than far more offensive things might. Pansy Parkinson is the kind of witch he shouldn’t even be nodding at in passing; one whose parents were surely planning a prank on the world well in advance when they named her, because their daughter did not grow up to be cute or  _floral_  in the least. Pansy Parkinson is poison, the kind that is especially adept at finding what hurts a person most and digging her claws in. Crawling under others’ skin comes naturally to her.

That, right there, is reason enough why he should stay away: he  _knows_  precisely how dangerous she is. The girl may have been petty and mean as a teenager, but they were all capable of so much more and he expects no less of a Slytherin. If only he could help himself.

Because all encounters with the Parkinson girl unfold exactly the same way.

On nights when he least expects it, there she is: a dark shadow leaning against his fire bright car outside a bar, a knowing look in her eyes as she stares steadily from across the street. For some reason, he always starts from the bottom up, he doesn’t know why. Dangerous heels to dark stockings to short skirts flirting with tan thighs to loose blouses skimming her upper half, leading up to that face, with a mouth stained dark pursed into a challenge and bangs brushing eyes that gleam smug. It is not supposed to be temptation; definitely not an invitation to take her home. It should not. It must not.

And yet, it always does.

Sooner or later, Pansy Parkinson is back where she has always been: under his skin and in his flat. But this time, it isn’t her sharp tongue or cruel remarks that have a habit of finding purchase in the nooks of his insecurities that let her in. This time, it is her cold steady eyes that dare him to do it, a challenge that he is helpless but to rise to. The same cruel tone that ridiculed his friends as a child murmurs secrets just as shameful in his ear as he thrusts into her, whispering _Look at you, so hard for the girl who almost sold your best friend_ and _That’s right, fuck me like it will change who we are_ and  _I know you_ _want me_ _, Weasley. Demeaning, isn’t it?_

And  _fuck_ , it should not be this good. There is something irrevocably fucked up in his head if it turns him on, but she does. She swaggers in, bringing with her  _something_ that he can’t quite explain. All he knows is that she feels like a car race, except this one is neither against himself nor his past. This one has him looking to the present like it is all that exists. If fucking Pansy Parkinson against his door and revelling in the sheer  **wrong**  of it is what has him feeling alive, so be it.

He can take it.

 

**It was a story that** **changed Icarus’ fall.**

Vodka makes her reckless.

Pansy never realised before because she had little opportunity to learn before, caught between her limited interaction with alcohol other than firewhiskey and sheer disdain for anything muggle. Then again, she has never had opportunity to flirt with a tipsy Ronald Weasley either, so she supposes it could have been either that had a sharp spark of excitement fizzling in the pit of her stomach. She hasn’t ever gone drinking with him, talked to him or even looked at him the way she does now. And she does.

It is somehow more embarrassing when it doesn’t involve clothes shoved off in haste, drunk on the hazy lust of having his mouth on her. Ron Weasley may be many things – stubborn, asinine and awkward, certainly – but he does know how to use that blabbering mouth of his and she can appreciate that even as she goads him. But no, it is the rest of the time that bothers her: the nights like this, when he is tipsy in a way that leaves him drowsy and exhausted and pulled under the haze of just enough alcohol that he is utterly shameless with it. His eyes hardly waver from the scrap of scalloped lace visible where her neckline has slipped too low, focussed on the edge of her bra that he can see, even as he slurs insults right back at her.

Pansy doesn’t know what it means that she knows precisely how serious he is — there is no heat behind their slurs now, no righteous anger that before could be sniffed out a mile away. Instead, it is her boots balanced on the dashboard of his hideous car and his hand resting casually on her thigh, him turned to look straight at her and her looking forward but meeting his gaze out of the corner of her eye.

It makes her doubt if all  _falls_  really are that. Ron Weasley, at any rate, does not feel like one. She knows kissing him  **should**  feel stupid and reckless, but she does it anyway because it doesn’t. It feels warm and delicious and  _fun_ , his big careful hand instantly slipping up to curl around her neck and her legs curling up in his lap.

And later, when they are less soft and lingering and more fast and desperate, that’s okay too.

 

**It was a story that looked like antimony.**

This was how the story went: girl hated boy and boy hated girl. They kissed.

It sucked.

They kissed again.

It still sucked.

But slowly, joint by aching joint, the carcass of their injured selves found a place to heal. They kissed again and again and  _again_  and slowly, it started to work. Eventually, they found a place and they fit. Inconveniently, yes. Unexpectedly, definitely. But they fit.

Eventually, they were neither black nor white; they were silver. Not metallic or soft, but a semi-metal like antimony, just as they were not good or bad; just people. Eventually, it was this:

Pansy woke to a heavy weight landing on her as a pale freckled leg curled over hers, and rolled her eyes before she just curved back against the chest that had come to rest against her back and fell asleep again. Ron woke up choking on a thick black strand he had accidentally gotten in his mouth and grinned before he merely stroked the wayward hair into place and tucked his face against the sleeping girl’s warm neck again.

All was well.

**Author's Note:**

> comments/kudos are much appreciated! ♥


End file.
